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📝 Eoy article (#546)
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authored by
Thibault Le Ouay
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apps/web/src/content/posts/2023-year-review.mdx
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apps/web/src/content/posts/2023-year-review.mdx
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---
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title: Our 2023 year in review.
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description:
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Let's review our year in 2023, analyze our metrics, and discuss our future
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plans.
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author:
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name: Thibault Le Ouay Ducasse
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url: https://twitter.com/thibaultleouay
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publishedAt: 2023-12-29
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image: /assets/posts/2023-year-review/title.png
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---
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It has been a wild six months for us at OpenStatus. In late June, we began
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writing the first line of code for OpenStatus.
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We started with a simple idea: make an open-source a status page, but we quickly
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realized that we could do more. We could build a platform that would allow you
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to monitor your services and notify your users when something goes wrong.
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In this article, I will share with you the challenges we encountered and how we
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solved them. We will also be sharing our metrics and our plans for the future.
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# A quick recap of our journey
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## June 2023
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**Middle of month**
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I asked on Twitter if people would be interested in an open-source alternative
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for a status page. Max replied to me, and we started to work on the project.
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<Tweet id="1669684109294157826" />
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**End of month**
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We wrote the first line of code for OpenStatus.
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## July 2023
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**Middle of month**
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My tweet got a lot of traction, and and it gave us the motivation to continue to
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build OpenStatus.
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<Tweet id="1679026811609464832" />
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**End of month**
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We launched the initial version of OpenStatus, which was more than just a basic
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status page. We incorporated website monitoring features that would shape the
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future of OpenStatus.
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Max's Twitter thread went viral, gaining us a lot of attention on the platform.
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<Tweet id="1685666982786404352" />
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After that OpenStatus trended on GitHub for a few days.
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## August 2023
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**Middle of month**
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We launched our first paid plan, which allowed us to cover our costs. Couple of
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hours after the launch, we had our first paying customer. We were so happy! 🎉
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## September 2023
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It was a month of reflection for us. We were a bit confused about the direction
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we wanted to pursue at that time. Having just a status page as a side business
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is cool, but we also aspire to build something that could become a full-fledged
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company in the future.
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## October 2023
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**Beginning of month**
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We launched on Hacker News, and we got a lot of feedback from the community. We
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were so happy to see that people were interested in our project.
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<Image
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alt="New users per week"
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src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/show-hn.png"
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width={650}
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height={575}
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/>
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We were not expecting such a good traction from the hacker news community
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**Middle of month**
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For some cost saving reasons, we decided to migrate our checker infrastucture
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from Vercel to Fly.io.
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**End of month**
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We told our migration in a blog post, and it got a lot of traction, also on
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Hacker News.
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<Image
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alt="New users per week"
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src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/blog-hn.png"
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width={650}
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height={575}
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/>
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## November 2023
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We have rewritten our checker infrastructure in Golang to enhance stability,
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resulting in cost savings on fly.io server.
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## December 2023
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We have launched our deploy your own status page
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# Our metrics
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## Our product metrics
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<Image
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alt="New users per week"
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src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/users-per-week.png"
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width={650}
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height={575}
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/>
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**Number of new users per week**
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<Image
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alt="New monitors per week"
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src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/monitors-per-week.png"
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width={650}
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height={575}
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/>
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**Number of monitors created per week**
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<Image
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alt="New Pages per week"
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src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/pages-per-week.png"
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width={650}
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height={575}
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/>
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**Number of page created per week**
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## Other metrics
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<Image
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alt="GitHub stars"
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src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/github-stars.png"
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width={650}
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height={575}
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/>
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**Number of GitHub stars**
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<Image
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alt="Visitors per month"
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src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/visitors.png"
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width={650}
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height={575}
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/>
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**Number of visitors per month**
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<Image
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alt="Search console"
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src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/search-console.png"
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width={650}
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height={575}
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/>
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**Search console**
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## Financials
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<Image
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alt="MRR"
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src="/assets/posts/2023-year-review/mrr.png"
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width={650}
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height={575}
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/>
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**Monthly recuring revenue**
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# Let's talked about our 2023 year
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## What went well
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We launched OpenStatus 🔥. We didn't waste too much time over-engineering it.
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We had a good traction among the developer community. We were able to get a lot
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of feedback from the community, which helped us to improve our product.
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The number of GitHub stars, users are a good indicator of the traction we had.
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We both reach more than 1000 followers on Twitter.
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## What could have gone better
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We can brag about our MRR on Twitter but we are still not profitable. We are
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still not able to cover our costs despites a small MRR.
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We could have listen more to our users. We could have done more to improve our
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product. We should have done more users surveys.
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## What went wrong
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We got confused. We were not sure about the direction we wanted to pursue. We
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also got defocused when VC started to reach out to us. They are paid to talk to
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you but not us. We are not building anything when we are talking to them.
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They also don't know more than us about what our customers want. They are not
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the one we should listen to. We should listen to our users 😁
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We still pay too much for Tinybird 😭.
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# Our plans for 2024
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First we want to reach profitability. 😁
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We will allocate more time to the project 🚀
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We will follow our intuition and not listen to VC. We will listen to our users
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instead. 🤦